Leading open source developers are calling for a boycott of
open standards organisation Oasis, after it changed its rules to
allow developers to charge royalties for some contributed
code.
An e-mail protest is being circulated among the development
community calling for Oasis to drop its plans and urging a boycott
of its development groups if it does not.
The work of Oasis is central to many development areas, including
the introduction of SAML, EBXML, UDDI and other web services
standards.
The call came after Oasis revised its intellectual property rights
policy to take account of "significant changes in the way that
intellectual property laws and practices affect e-business
standards". Rather than mandate a single set of terms for all work,
Oasis allows members of each of its 60 or so committees to choose
the intellectual property models best suited to their work.
Oasis committees can elect to work under reasonable and
non-discriminatory (Rand) terms, royalty-free on Rand terms, or
royalty-free on limited terms.
"The policy clearly acknowledges the importance of creating
royalty-free standards by providing two royalty-free models, while
still allowing for work to be done under Rand terms when members
prefer that," said Oasis chief executive Patrick Gannon.
"Although nearly all Oasis standards can be implemented today on a
royalty-free basis, the revised intellectual property rights policy
helps to clarify our open standards process and assure implementers
that Oasis standards can be adopted with confidence."
Gartner analyst Ray Valdes said, "The diversity of IT systems built
today is increasing significantly. This is not only with regard to
their scope, complexity and interoperability, but also in the way
these systems are built, and in the types of organisations that
build them.
"These changes require standards organisations to articulate a
broader set of approaches to intellectual property issues than has
been the case in the past."
The boycott campaign is led by several well-known open source
developers, including Bruce Perens, who supports the General Public
Licence used for Linux.